In addition to my article for Traverse, Gerald Russello has written a fine piece on Kirk for The New Criterion:

Kirk becomes a more complex figure from the vantage point of a decade and more after his death. The typical caricature of Kirk as an ersatz eighteenth-century gentleman turns out to be wrong, made by a too-hasty assessment based on appearances. It is belied by Kirk’s own expressed distaste for that period, which he once described as “an age of gilded selfishness and frivolous intellectuality—an age almost without a heart.” To the contrary, Kirk was keenly aware of his time, and his use of Burke and others was part of a deliberate design. Kirk’s exaggerated persona of the “Bohemian Tory,” and the sometimes out-of-the-way subjects he wrote about—“Will the Habsburg Return?” was a typical column subject—were attempts to jar his readers out of complacency. But instead of the theatrics of the Beats and their hippie descendants, which were tired agitprop even then, Kirk was trying to spur deeper reflection on the tradition he uncovered in his books, running from Burke to T. S. Eliot, and from the revelations of Jerusalem to Philadelphia’s ordered liberty. For this reason, Kirk was even cautiously optimistic about postmodernism. While he recognized the nonsense that that term often denotes, nevertheless, in sounding the final death knell of rationalistic liberalism, he suggested that postmodernism could provide an opportunity for a resurgence of the conservative imagination.